Ethical Relativism History

Ariadne's Thread is designed to help you work out and defend your
own views on the complicated subject of ethical relativism. Some fairly non-controversial history
and commentary may serve as an introduction. Even this history,
however, will show that there is no single definition of relativism, the
arguments for and against relativism are quite varied, and the implications of
relativism are disputed. Nevertheless, this history will provide a brief survey
of several popular theories of ethics, introduce some of the terminology that is
used either to state or describe ethical theories, and clarify
some of the philosophical issues that must be resolved in order to develop
a reasoned position on relativism.

This sketch
covers only one slice of the history of ethical theory. There are many theories,
such as those defended by moral theologians --Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and
others-- that are not included. In part this is due to the limitations of the
author. It is also true, however, that the theory called 'ethical relativism' did not develop among
moral theologians. It is a secular theory developed chiefly by anthropologists
and secular moral philosophers. Despite its limitations, this sketch will include the writers most often
referred to by the theoreticians of relativism.

The term 'ethics' can refer to either of the following:

A system of
normative moral judgments, guidelines, and ideals

a theory about
ethics in the first sense (also called meta-ethics).

A system of
ethics in the first sense might tell us that murder is morally impermissible,
that mercy is morally good, that marital fidelity is morally ideal, or that
caring for one's children is morally obligatory. Alternatively, it might
describe the moral virtues of the ideal man or woman. A theory of ethics in the
second sense attempts to answer questions such as "What is the meaning of
the term 'good'?", "What is the identifying characteristic of a true
or binding moral principle?", "What grounds or evidence are
relevant when assessing ethical judgements of the first type?", or
"What is the relationship between ethical judgments and matter of
fact?" This
distinction is probably not entirely clear-cut, but it is still a useful way to
divide up a large topic. (For several criticisms of the distinction, see the
introduction to Roger N. Hancock's Twentieth Century Ethics.) This historical sketch emphasizes
ethics in the second sense (i.e., theories about ethics or meta-ethics) because
ethical relativism is itself a meta-ethical theory rather than a claim that this
or that action is morally right or good or ideal. There are, however, many forms
of ethical relativism; and there is no agreement on exactly what constitutes
ethical relativism.

There were several influential ethical theories developed
in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Two of these are the theory developed
by Immanuel Kant and the utilitarian theory developed by Jeremy Bentham,
John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and others.

The
German philosopher Immanuel
Kant (1724-1804) attempted to formulate a criterion that
would allow us to identify correct (i.e. binding) moral laws. The proposition "Lying is always wrong" is an example
of a moral law. In his 1785 Fundamental Principles of the
Metaphysic of Morals, Kant proposed his criterion. As he understood it, when
we acted (for example, when we told a lie) we based our action on a subjective maxim such as
"It is morally permissible for me to lie when it will save me a lot of
trouble." As a criterion for identifying morally correct laws, Kant proposed that

I am never to act
otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a
universal law.

He seemed to believe that generalizations that failed
this test would contain a logical contradiction or would be self-defeating in
some way. This, at least, is one
interpretation of Kant's complex view.

The utilitarian theory
emerged in the 18th century. One of its best known proponents was the English legal
philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Bentham published his
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation in 1789. He
advocated what he called the principle of utility.

An action then may be said to be conformable to
the principle of utility, or, for shortness sake, to utility, (meaning which
respect to the community at large) when the tendency it has to augment the
happiness of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it.

Several differences between Kant and Bentham are obvious.

Kant's
theory is often described as 'non-consequentialist' because it does not
determine the correctness of a judgment or a law from an assessment of
its empirical consequences. Lying may be wrong because the generalization
"Anyone may lie when it will save him or her a lot of trouble" yields
a logical contradiction of some sort. But it is not wrong because it makes it
makes people less happy, because it does not fulfill their needs or because it
does not satisfy their desires. Bentham's theory, on the other hand, is called 'consequentialist'
because it uses empirical consequences to decide the morality of acts.

Kant's principle does not identify the supreme good, but rather
provides a logical test or touchstone for assessing generalized maxims.
Bentham's principle tells us what the supreme good is (namely, happiness) and
thereby provides an empirical test for judging actions.

In
the early 19th century, there were many critics of Bentham's theory. It was reformulated and
defended by another Englishman, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), in a series of articles collectively
called Utilitarianism (1863). Mill added at least two new features to the
theory. First, he allowed that people had higher and lower faculties and that
the pleasures associated with the higher faculties were more valuable than
others. Second, according to some interpreters, he gave a key role to secondary
principles such as "Do not lie" or "Do not commit murder."
Individual actions were normally to be judged with reference to these
principles. The secondary principles were themselves judged to be more or less
acceptable by their tendency to produce "an existence exempt as far as
possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both in point of
quantity and quality...." Because of his use of secondary principles, Mill
is sometimes described as a 'rule' utilitarian rather than an 'act' utilitarian.

The
Kantian and utilitarian theories are part of what some writers have called the
'Enlightenment project,' which is itself often placed under the rubric of
'modernism.' The essential point is that both theories, in different ways,
attempt to provide us with moral knowledge. In the one case that
knowledge is identified by a logical test. In the other case it is provided by
scientific methods used to predict consequences. In both cases, however, a firm
foundation for moral judgments and generalizations is sought and found. Both
ethical relativists and the later postmodernists challenge the claims made by
these modernists to provide ethical knowledge.

Among secular, academic philosophers in the English
speaking world, the most influential
ethical theorist of the early 20th century was the Cambridge philosopher G. E.
Moore (1873-1958). Moore published Principia Ethica in 1903 and Ethics
in 1912. His views are difficult to summarize. He believed
that the term 'good' could not be defined by analyzing it into parts. Instead,
it should be regarded as a simple or primitive notion. In addition, 'good' could not be
defined as happiness or pleasure or in terms of
the "natural" properties of things. This always involved a mistake,
because we could always meaningfully ask whether something with any given
natural property was good. Good could not be equated with "having a
tendency to produce pleasure," for example, because we could meaningfully
ask whether something that had a tendency to produce pleasure was good. This
would not be possible if 'good' meant the same as 'having a tendency to
produce pleasure.' Moore believed that such
definitions involved what he called the "naturalistic fallacy." He
concluded that 'good' referred to a "non-natural" property of things. Personal affection and aesthetic enjoyment were examples of goods.
Our actions are good and right to the extent that they produce the greatest
possible amount of good. Thus, Moore was a consequentialist like the 19th-century
utilitarians; but he did not accept pleasure or happiness as either the
definition or the test of goodness.

Moore's
criticism of the naturalistic fallacy was accepted by many philosophers, but his concept of
goodness as a non-natural property was not. Despite his intentions, his ideas
tended to make the defense of ethical knowledge more difficult.

According to the Oxford philosopher J. O. Urmson, Moore
left many English and American philosophers with a dilemma. They could not
accept naturalism but neither could they accept Moore's idea of a non-natural
property. Partly as a solution to this dilemma, some philosophers developed
what is called the emotive theory of ethics. The best known statements of this
view can be found in A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) and
C. L. Stevenson's Ethics and Language (1944). The core of the emotivist
theory was the claim that ethical judgments such as "Murder is morally
wrong" were neither true nor false in the same sense that we apply to descriptive statements
like "John is dead." Instead, ethical judgements expressed
the attitudes or emotions of the speaker or evoked attitudes in the hearer.
There were many criticisms of emotivism, including those in Urmson's 1968 book The
Emotive Theory of Ethics. Emotivism was popular for a time with professional philosophers; but, more importantly, passed beyond professional circles to become
popular with a segment of the larger public. In doing so, it helped to make plausible
another theory developed at about the same time by anthropologists -- the theory of
cultural relativism.

(Most philosophers distinguish emotivism from the theory
sometimes called subjectivism. According to subjectivism,
ethical judgments describe the attitudes or emotions of the speaker.
Statements of this sort could be true or false, since they might correctly or
incorrectly describe those attitudes or emotions. The emotivists rejected
subjectivism. One argument against subjectivism is that it fails to account for
the fact that there are serious ethical disputes. If subjectivism is correct,
everyone's ethical judgments describe their own emotions and do not actually
contradict each other.)

Although emotivism had many critics, some of its major
ideas were accepted by many moral philosophers. These included the claim that
ethical statements were neither true nor false in the same sense that factual
statements were true or false. In addition, the claim that there is no ethical
knowledge in the same sense in which there is scientific knowledge was widely
accepted. Ethical theories that include these claims are sometimes referred to
as 'non-cognitive' theories. Emotivism is one such theory. Another non-cognitive
theory that became popular after the heyday of emotivism was the work of R. M.
Hare. Hare published The Language of Morals in 1952 and Freedom and
Reason in 1963. Hare emphasized that ethical judgments are prescriptive
judgments. He also argued that ethical judgments are "universalizable"
in certain ways. We could not, for example, say that two actions are the same in
all relevant respects and also claim that one action was good while the other
was bad. His theory is called prescriptivism.

The theories of Moore, Stevenson, Hare, and most other
academic moral philosophers in England and America in the first half of the 20th
century tended to stress meta-ethical questions. The last half of the century
has seen at least two shifts: (1) a shift toward substantive ethical and social
issues; and (2) a shift away from non-cognitivism.

The shift toward substantive issues was clearly marked by
several articles by John Rawls beginning in the late 1950s. Rawls elaborated his
views in his 1971 Theory of Justice. He called his view "justice as
fairness" and argued by using a device called the "original
position" and a thinking process called "reflective equilibrium."
Rawls leaned to the political left and made use of a form of social contract
theory as well as a theory of individual rights. His views were widely discussed
and drew criticism from those further left and further right. Perhaps the most
famous critique was Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, published
in 1974. Nozick defended the theory already called libertarianism. He stressed
strong individual rights or entitlements (including property rights) and minimal
government.

The theory of ethical relativism developed alongside the
ideas of Moore, Stevenson, Hare, Rawls, and Nozick. Initially, it was the work of
anthropologists and social scientists. Edward Westermarck, a Finnish sociologist and philosopher,
wrote The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas in 1906-08 and Ethical
Relativity in 1932. Westermarck showed that there was at some level a great diversity
among the ethical judgments made by different groups of people around the world. Further, he denied what he
referred to as the "objectivity" of moral values:

The supposed objectivity of moral values, as
understood in this treatise, implies that they have a real existence apart
from any reference to a human mind, that what is said to be good or bad, right
or wrong, cannot be reduced merely to what people think to be good or bad,
right or wrong. It makes morality a matter of truth and falsity, and to say
that a judgment is true obviously means something different from the statement
that it is thought to be true.

In the 1930s and 1940s a view called "cultural
relativism" was made popular by students of the German-American
anthropologist Franz Boas. Again, the diversity of moral views found throughout
the world impressed these writers. Ruth Benedict, for example, wrote that:

We recognize that morality differs in every
society, and is a convenient term for socially approved habits.

Melville Herskovits in particular wrote frequently
and with passion on the subject. A posthumous collection of his writings was
edited by his wife Frances Herskovits and published as Cultural Relativism in 1972. Herskovits
believed that "Evaluations are relative to the cultural background
out of which they arise." Ethical norms were binding only within a culture
and scientific methods could not prove the truth or superiority of the ethics or
values of any one culture. This is one definition of ethical relativism. He held
open the possibility that there might be some ethical "universals"
that were the same across cultures. Anthropological field work might eventually
discover such universals. But the existence of universals did not affect his
main point.

The debate about the foundations of morals --
absolute or relative -- became more than an academic exercise in the 1930s and
1940s with the rise of fascist governments and fascist philosophy in Europe.
Because fascists rejected the values built into democratic political theory, it
became necessary for American intellectuals to examine and defend those values.
For a fascinating history of the debate over ethical relativism in the 1930s and
1940s, see Edward A. Purcell, Jr. The Crisis of Democratic Theory.

For many years, professional moral philosophers tended to
ignore or dismiss the
arguments of the anthropologists. More recently, however, philosophers such as
Gilbert Harman and David Wong have
created more sophisticated versions of ethical relativism.

These questions continue to be debated with no sign of agreement.
Ariadne's Thread may help you to develop your own views.

References: For historical background on recent ethical theory, see Twentieth
Century Ethics by Roger N. Hancock and Rationalism, Realism, and
Relativism by Robert L. Arrington.